As Whitman said so eloquently, "I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return." Thoughts, that is, about being a librarian.

May 30, 2008

The pace of change

Robert Darnton writesabout the increasing pace of information change in the June 12th issue of The New York Review of Books and and argues that research libraries will NOT become obsolete. He notes:

"Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears
pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the
speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in
which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue
that the new information technology should force us to rethink the
notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took
the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out
of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are
constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of
firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By
studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to
read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate
old books."

Darnton argues that the idea of textual stablity (in many cases, one version of a text, with all revisions and corrections, published by one publisher) is a relatively recent one in book publishing, and provides an example of how each age of information change goes through turbulent periods of instability and chaos. In his essay, Darnton uses the example of Google's book digitization program as another of these technological changes which are changing the way we communicate, read and exchange ideas. But, he also makes a case for research libraries and their continuing importance in a Google world:

Criteria of what is important will vary from generation to generation. Historians and anthropologists of the future may rely heavily on materials which our current generation might consider ephemera. Analyzing an advertisement in a magazine from the turn-of-the century is an important element in understanding what people bought and how companies marketed to consumers.

Google will find it nearly impossible to digitize ALL the holdings of the great research libraries, and to date they have 28 libraries signed up, but there are nearly 543 million volumes in the research libraries in the U.S. A bit overwhelming, even for Google.

Copyright will be an obstruction that Google might be able to overcome (currently Google is working on arrangements with publishers and authors), but Google will probably never be able to keep up with the flood of new books published every year. Plus, does Google even promise to conserve texts indefinitely? They are providing access now, but what is their mission and goal in providing these digital copies in perpetuity?

The obsolescence of electronic media -- who knows how long Google will be king or even around?

The people behind Google are human and will make mistakes and errors when scanning and digitizing. The reproductions may not be perfect.

Is digitization the best medium for preservation, or will it be eclipsed by something else? Will these copies last?

Google gets to decide which edition or copies of a particular book gets digitized and then made available. Are they the best judge of which copy is suitable for a researcher's purpose?

The last point which Darnton makes is the one many of us have voiced: the physical properties of the texts themselves. The size, shape, paper quality and thickness, smells, margin notes, pages which have been dog-eared and stained, the actual feel of a book can be important to the researcher.

The most important point, though, which Darnton makes is this: Google is great, no doubt, and libraries are well-advised to take advantage of electronic resources, but don't think of libraries as mere warehouses or storerooms of material. He's talking about the big research libraries, of course, but this could equally be applied for the undergraduate college library as well. We do our users well to remind ourselves that we are not competing with Google, that we should collaborate and work with services like Google to get at the heart of our collections and make them more accessible. This won't make us obsolete; on the contrary, we will become even more important as all the technological changes keep coming, fast and furious.